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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T19:27:12+00:00

I’m trying to parse some HTML using XPath in Java. Consider this HTML: <td

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I’m trying to parse some HTML using XPath in Java. Consider this HTML:

    <td class="postbody"> 
        <img src="...""><br />
<br />
<b>What is Blah?</b><br />
<br />
Blah blah blah
<br />

Note that “What Is Blah” is helpfully contained within a b tag and is therefore easily parseable. But “Blah blah blah” is out in the open, and so I can only pick it up by calling text() on its parent node.

Thing is, I need to go through this in sequence, putting the img down, then the bolded text, then the body text. It’s important it ends up in order (it needn’t be processed in order, if you can suggest a way that takes two passes).

So are there any suggestions for how, if I’ve got the above contained within a Java XPath node, I can go through it in turn and get what I need?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I think an SAX based parser would be a better tool for this problem. It’s event based so you can parse your XML document in order.

    But it’s an XML parser so you’ll need to have a valid XML document. I never used JTidy but it’s a java port of the HTML Tidy, so hopefully it can help you to transform your (invalid) HTML documents to a valid XML.

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